


descending a tower

by corcou



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 09:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5534573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corcou/pseuds/corcou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ohtori instills a remarkable set of beliefs in its children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	descending a tower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tanglelore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanglelore/gifts).



**boy with blossom**

Care is for  
the powerless. Power snicker-snacks. Instead summer drips its dog-belly warmth over him,  
besieges her flesh hand to thigh. Question  
without answer: breathe _How do you feel_ , breath scuffing the beautiful and  
unlockable joints of her face, which have no fixed feeling, like a piano untuned,  
a mouse-et pudding, a starlet cast by sunshade, every word she left unsaid  
and he would have kindly unheard. To give tea/half-sandwich/well-wishes—her expression as cool and tightly cloaked  
as an apple—when once dragons he took by the sword. Girls by the mouth. Now  
powerless, he is ungirded, stripped of his guardian wolfskin, his steely aspiration, shed of mantle and control;  
he knows not which part of him slips into the schoolyard banner  
or the curry cauldron or each maiden  
with one petal pinned yet to her suit. But how he cares for them, how he can! Sweet hearts, their honeyed blood  
lifting his staircases and spine, he cares whether they rise by slap or his hand to their thighs,  
their nude lips, their eyelids. He must open  
all these gifts. He must envelop their bearers in his fine wool.

 

**Hatch**

_Things Tanaka-sensei taught us about cooking_  
You have to use your heart. If it squirms  
in the ramekin, all the better. Go out to the courtyard,  
cast your cookie cutter under moonlight  
and watch a girl emerge. At first she'll be stage-fraught  
but if you butter her up and give her a frog's ear  
she'll wear it, and sing like a blackbird  
or raven. Taxonomy finds difficulties in those  
who, hope-drained, are more feathered, but at least  
you can reference chickens: dressing is preparatory.

 _Things Inoue-sensei taught us about geography_  
Compass rose. When you cling to one clear floating thought  
between valleys of terror, or anguish, or love, thank  
all those children who prepared your path to the  
telescoping tower, frilled as it may be with stairs.  
Along this, young goose, you migrate. Your throat's lump,  
your chest's sinking stone—they know their north;  
build them into the archway, accumulated one burden  
at a time, that marks your soul's departure.

 

**storm warning**

Every cold enclosed place protects you; the more constricting the enclosure  
the better the protection. Stand in the bell-tower, higher than  
any pedestal, and the courtyard is a white plaster  
on the face of the earth, by shape a tomb. If you were there  
every noise would echo, nothing is solely yours, it would be safe  
to feel your emotional apparatus creak like an unused voice: it wouldn't be you  
who looses that sound when her elbow's wrinkles rub your arm. You have  
an unpierced shield, it wouldn't be you who let in all those outsiders  
and calluses, this little smile unwarded by lenses, her pink White Day lamp  
where once all whiteness was white, all roses equivalent in color, that teach  
you the different intentions of light. No one is hail or flood, no sass strikes  
from the sky as fire, but still you are lifted in her wake  
and flung, like a good knife, against walls that solidify  
as never before. You were admitted once, ghost,  
through these ceilings one-way, the only way through was forward,  
unseen and deflecting behind your mirror; but know, indecorously hugged,  
berated, allowed to stab, that the other way through is out.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, dear recipient, for the opportunity to have a ridiculously fun time with Utena! I apologize for the lack of truly literary restraint, but at least there are no engendering jokes?


End file.
